pium could
minister to happiness, as contrasted with those false vain views of it,
remind me of Tennyson's poetical '_Timbuctoo_,' gorgeous as a new
Jerusalem in Apocalyptic glories, and the mean filth-obstructed kraals
dotted on an arid plain, to which, for very truthfulness, his soaring
fancy drops plumbdown, as the shot eagle in '_Der Freischutz_.'

Let this then serve as a meagre sketch of my defunct treatise on opium:
think not that I love the subject, curious and fertile though it be;
perhaps, philosophically regarded, it is not a better one than _gin_;
but ears polite endure not the plebeian monosyllable, unless indeed with
a reduplicated _n_, as Mr. Lane _will_ have it our whilom genie should
be spelt: accordingly, I magnanimously give up the whole idea, and am
liberal enough, in this my dying determination, to sign a codicil,
bequeathing opium to my executors.

* * * * *

Novelism is a field so filled with copy-holders, so populously tenanted
in common, that it requires no light investigation to find a site
unoccupied, and a hero or heroine waiting to be hired. Nevertheless, I
seem to myself to have lighted on a rich and little-cultivated corner;
imagining that the subject is a good one, because still untouched,
founded on facts, and with amplifiable variations that border on the
probable. He that lionizes Stratford-on-Avon, will remember in one of
the Shakspearian museums of that classic town, the pictured trance of
hapless

CHARLOTTE CLOPTON,

as it was limned in death-seeming life. He will be shown the tombs of
her ancient family in Stratford church, and the door of that fatal
vault; he will hear something of her noble birth--her fine
character--her fascinating beauty--her short, innocent, eventful
life--her horrible death. Consider, too, the age and locality in which
she lived, Elizabethan, Shakspeare's; the great contemporary characters
that might be casually introduced; the mysterious suicide, in that dim
dreadful pool at the end of the terraced walk among the cropped yews, of
her poor only sister, Margaret; equalled only in the miserable interest
by that of Charlotte herself. And then for a plot: some darkly hinted
parricide of years agone, in the generation but one preceding, has dropt
its curse upon the now guiltless, but, by the law of Providence,
still-not-acquitted family; a parricide consequent on passionate love,
differing religions, and the Montague-and-Ca